Toronto Maple Leafs center Peter Holland is dealing with lace bite, which sounds awful — because it is. It's a problem with the tendons on top of the foot and makes tying skates painful/impossible.

Holland, 23, is going to miss the Leafs' Saturday game against the Ottawa Senators. If it keeps causing problems, he should try peanut butter. That worked for former Pittsburgh Penguins defenseman Peter Taglianetti during the 1991 playoffs.

Skip Thayer, who was the medical trainer, we tried everything. We had all kinds of foams in the locker room — big foam, thin foam, high-density foam — so we tried everything, cutting doughnuts into it, and nothing seemed to work. The Canadian ski team sent this foam they used for the ski boots that the same thing happens.

We call it lace bit where you get real raw right at the top there, where it starts cutting your skin. They have that with ski boots, so they have this special foam they use, and they thought that might work, and it didn't. NASA sent something, some foam they used with astronauts, and that didn't work.

So we're sitting there and Skip was saying, 'When I was in Chicago as a trainer, Al Secord had some real bad lace bite like that, and they tried to figure stuff out. And they experimented with peanut butter. So all of a sudden, boom, hey, we'll try this. And it worked. We had a baggie, taped it up, so I was able to tie my skates.

Bonus fact: It was Peter Pan peanut butter — which is actually best when put in a plastic bag and stuck in a hockey skate. Terrible, terrible peanut butter.